5

Germania Delenda Est¹

America Enters the War – 1915

Peter G. Tsouras

Liverpool, England, 10 September 1915

It was an act of gallant courtesy gone awry. The British were expecting the first American regiment to arrive in Liverpool since the United States had declared war on Germany in June and had gone through their military music library to find just the right piece to welcome their guests. As the men of the Georgia National Guard regiment began marching down the gangplank, they were stunned to be serenaded by a fine rendition of ‘Marching Through Georgia’.² They took it well, though. When Oscar Wilde had said that the British and Americans were two peoples separated by the same language, he was on to something. American overstatement would collide with British understatement all too often.

That collision was all the more frequent in the intemperate person of the commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), Lieutenant General Frederick Funston. At barely five foot five inches, 121 pounds, he was a bantam rooster of a man. In addition to a brilliant, even ruthless combat record in the war with Spain and the Philippine Insurrection, he was a good friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, who had personally selected him to lead the AEF. To say that he was an impulsive man was putting it mildly. Incendiary would be a better descriptor. His comments on what should be done to those who opposed American policy in the Philippines almost ignites on its own:

I personally strung up thirty-five Filipinos without trial, so what was all the fuss over Waller’s ‘dispatching’ a few ‘treacherous savages’? If there had been more Smiths and Wallers, the war would have been over long ago. Impromptu domestic hanging might also hasten the end of the war. For starters, all Americans who had recently petitioned Congress to sue for peace in the Philippines should be dragged out of their homes and lynched.³

Theodore Roosevelt and the Road to War

Theodore Roosevelt’s victory in the 1912 election at the head of a united Republican Party would be looked upon by future historians as a decisive factor in the coming Great War. Roosevelt was an Anglophile to the bone. He and the then Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, had led the rapprochement of their two countries that had sunk to a nadir because of Britain’s all-too-painful preference for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Roosevelt realised that the unity of blood, language, history, and culture as well as Britain’s conduct in international affairs made the two countries natural allies. Had not the Iron Chancellor himself, Otto von Bismarck, remarked that ‘The most significant event of the 20th century will be the fact that the North Americans speak English?’⁴ Roosevelt could therefore write the following to Prime Minister Asquith on 22 January 1915:

To the crux of the situation has been Belgium. If England or France had acted toward Belgium as Germany has acted I should have opposed them, exactly as I now oppose Germany. I have emphatically approved your action as a model for what should be done by those who believe that treaties should be observed in good faith and that there is such a thing as international morality. I take the position as an American; who is no more an Englishman than he is a German, who endeavors loyally to serve the interest of his own country, but also has endeavored to do what he can for justice and decency as regards mankind at large and who therefore feels obliged to judge all other nations by their conduct on any given occasion.⁵

He had given immediate and forceful opposition to the German violation of Belgian neutrality. That his remonstrations to the German government had been met with a feckless argument for the iron law of necessity had only accelerated his natural desire to weigh into the fight. He was a naturally combative man, and the German response, as well as the horror stories of German atrocities, convinced him that America needed to be in this war. Unrestricted German submarine warfare and the sinking of the British liner Lusitania by a German submarine on 7 May 1915 with the loss of 128 American lives, mostly women and children, had given him all the ammunition he needed. The photos of babies washing up on the Irish shore stunned the nation. This followed the widespread revulsion at the first use of poison gas by the Germans at Ypres in late April. The stories of the attack on their Canadian cousins struck a strong chord with the American public. Roosevelt now acted while the American anger was white hot. At night on 1 June, ‘armed cavalry restrained a seething multitude outside the Capitol, while in front of a subdued Congress, with a packed gallery listening, the President delivered his war message. The Supreme Court justices were present. They and most of the Congressmen wore small American flags in their lapels.’ The House of Representatives voted with near unanimity. The United States was now at war with the German Empire and an ally of the Entente.⁶

Despite his determination to enter the war and his revulsion at German conduct, Roosevelt retained a residue of respect and even affection for the German people. He had acquired it in a five-month visit to Dresden as a fifteen year old when he learned to speak passable German. He would later write, ‘I gained an impression of the German people which I never got over. From that time to this it would have been quite impossible to make me feel that the Germans were foreigners.’ He recalled that his stay had ‘made a subconscious impression upon me which … is very vivid still forty years later’.⁷

The immediate result of the declaration of war was the almost complete cut-off of the foreign trade that was slipping through the British blockade of Germany, almost all of which had been carried in American bottoms, almost four hundred ships since the war had begun less than a year before. As Captain B. H. Liddell Hart observed, ‘No longer was the grip of the naval blockade hampered by neutral quibbles, but instead America’s cooperation converted it into a strangle-hold under which the enemy must soon grow limp, since military power is based on economic endurance.’⁸

Huge loans to the Allies followed, as did vast orders to American industry which was already straining to meet those placed since the previous August. The United States could produce many things, but it was not tooled up to manufacture the weapons of war. That would take time. The army had fewer than four hundred thousand of its excellent M1903 Springfield rifles, produced by the Springfield Arsenal, in reserve. Private American factories, such as Remington, Winchester, and Midvale Steel were already under contract with the British and Russians. The British Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener had placed an order for two million Enfield rifles which had soaked up most of American private capacity without yet producing many weapons. Private industry simply had no excess capacity. The decision was made to issue Springfield rifle stocks first and produce what they could at the Springfield Arsenal. It was hoped that then production would catch up. Events would prove that hope was not a strategy. The only fallback was to issue the stocks of half a million inferior Krag-Jorgensen rifles, which the M1903 had replaced. Similar problems existed for the production of artillery and machine guns. The result was that soldiers could be conscripted and trained faster than they could be armed. British and French production was in similar throes of expansion and could not even support their own requirements.

Unfortunately, time was the element that could not be accelerated. That was especially true in the creation of the necessary expeditionary force that would dwarf the entire Union Army in the Civil War. Socrates had put his finger on the problem when he had observed that ‘a disorderly mob is no more an army than a heap of building materials is a house.’⁹

In 1915 the US Army numbered 255,000 men. The National Guard added another quarter million. There were also 10,000 marines. There would have been fewer than 190,000 regulars had it not been for the military preparedness programme Roosevelt had pushed through in his first year in office. The programme also paid for a quadrupling of the General Staff from fifty-five to two hundred officers. Ford Motor Company was producing a specially designed robust truck for the army. The Signal Corps had been upgraded with equipment and its air component expanded to two hundred aircraft, with intensive training of pilots based on growing experience of the war in Europe. An interesting innovation was the establishment of a reserve officers’ training programme at a large new camp near Plattsburg, New York, that was turning out several thousand second lieutenants a year. A few were accepted on active duty, more went into the National Guard, but the large majority went back to civilian life, willing to be recalled in a national emergency. The hardest part of the reform was to subordinate the traditionally autonomous army bureaus directly to the Chief of Staff. Roosevelt had to marshal all the powers of the bully pulpit and cash in a lot of political favours to generate public support. Even after this immense effort, the Military Preparedness Bill of 1913 had barely passed the Congress. But it had passed.¹⁰

Roosevelt had done more than push through this bill. He had appointed Lieutenant General Leonard Wood to a second term as Chief of Staff. They had met during the Cuban campaign of 1899, and Roosevelt, then commanding his own regiment of the Rough Riders, had been immensely impressed with the army physician, the only one ever to rise to the position of Chief of Staff. He had been a champion of military preparedness himself, and Roosevelt and he found natural allies in each other. Early in his administration, the president had ordered Wood to begin planning for a major expansion of the army in time of war. He agreed with Wood’s recommendation to also begin planning for conscription to man this new army. In late August 1914, Roosevelt further instructed Wood to begin planning for sending that army to Europe to fight on the side of the Allies. The newly expanded General Staff found an immense task set before it.

Roosevelt drew on the men he had met in the war with Spain. Funston was one of them. Another was Brigadier General John J. Pershing, who had commanded a troop of the black 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers at St Juan Hill. Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and the Buffalo Soldiers attacked together up the hill. He remarked that Pershing ‘was the coolest man under fire I ever saw’. As president he jumped the then Captain Pershing to the rank of brigadier general over 882 senior officers.¹¹ Now, as he appointed Funston to command the AEF, he promoted Pershing to major general and designated him to command the first US division (1st Infantry Division) to arrive in France.

The Yanks Are Coming

Within two weeks of the declaration of war, Funston and his AEF staff had set sail for Europe. He had surrounded himself with the army’s best and brightest, men who knew how to get things done and had the drive to do it. The US Army’s excellent school system had prepared them for just this crisis.

They arrived in Liverpool on 21 May and almost immediately Funston’s lack of discretion set a jarring note. The French and British were attacking in Artois but had suffered heavy losses for little gain in the face of a well-prepared and tenacious German defence. Funston commented tactlessly that the US Army would have carried the German positions easily. That immediately got the British backs up and served only to confirm opinion of Americans as ill-mannered boors. Funston’s meeting with the king was therefore not as cordial as George V had wanted it to be; his meeting with the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, was downright frosty.

Funston continued to break diplomatic crockery after landing in France despite the studied efforts of his hosts to be gracious and accommodating. Frantic cables from the American ambassadors in London and Paris alarmed the president enough to do what he had wanted to do in the first place. On 10 June he embarked for Europe on board a fast cruiser. It was a typically bold move that shattered precedent. No president of the United States had ever left the country during his time in office. Accompanying him was his distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The dashing young politician’s progressivism had been influenced by the older man. Theodore had given away his niece, Eleanor Roosevelt, to young Franklin at their wedding in 1904, joking, ‘Well, Franklin, there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family.’¹² So, he found it easy to change parties after a successful term in the New York State senate to accept the president’s offer of the position of Assistant Secretary of the Army. The president had a role for Franklin. He was to remain in France and rein in Funston’s tongue.¹³

The president’s visit was a great success. His magnetic personality and engaging Anglophilia wiped away the irritation caused by Funston. His meeting with George V had gone superbly well, prompting the king to say, ‘It has always been my dream that the two English-speaking nations should some day be united in a great cause, and to-day my dream is realised. Together we are fighting for the greatest cause for which peoples could fight. The Anglo-Saxon race must save civilisation.’¹⁴ The king had inherited this belief in the natural affinity of the English-speaking peoples from his father, the late Edward VII. The occasional jibe at the French was made with that sort of knowing look that presupposed that the Americans shared the traditional British disdain for their Gallic allies, not realising the bond of affection between the United States and France dating back to the War for Independence. Attempts at humour at the expense of the French usually fell flat, such as the one made by British general, ‘If [you Americans serve] with the French, you would probably want your own food supply also.’¹⁵

The British assumption that Americans were only slightly removed Britons did not take into account the creation of the American character and that almost half of the American people were not of British origin by this time. The Americans of Irish and German origin were a significant proportion of the population. Irish-Americans were largely descendants of the refugees of the Great Famine, and many nursed a hatred of Britain as a cherished legacy. The process of Americanisation, though, had created a new identity that, in this time of national crisis, had trumped the past. The engine of assimilation had created an American nationality whether the name was Keyes, Kelly, or Keller.

Thus, the president was highly conscious of American national interests and would go only so far as to accommodate the Anglo-Saxon theme pushed by the British. When Prime Minister Herbert Asquith recommended that the American forces be associated with the British in a special arrangement, Roosevelt made it emphatically clear that the United States would not play favourites among its allies. Needless to say, when he repeated his position in Paris, it was enthusiastically greeted. That did not stop the French from trying to establish their own special relationship with the Americans based upon the cherished memory in the United States of the French aid during the War for Independence. Funston remarked that he would be a rich man if he got a nickel for every time the French brought up the name Lafayette.

Roosevelt turned the charm campaign back upon the French when he laid a wreath on the tomb of Lafayette in Picpus Cemetery in Paris. He noted that the soil that covered the grave had been brought from Bunker Hill, that Lafayette had been the only man ever granted American citizenship by Congress, that Washington loved him like a son, and that his memory was beloved to the nation. He ended his speech, saying, ‘America has joined forces with the Allied Powers, and what we have of blood and treasure are yours. Therefore it is that with loving pride we drape the colors in tribute of respect to this citizen of your great republic. And here and now, in the presence of the illustrious dead, we pledge our hearts and our honor in carrying this war to a successful issue. Lafayette, we are here.’ The ovation from the huge French crowd broke like a thunderclap.¹⁶

Settling Down in France

The British referred to their appearance as the ‘Fred and Franklin Show’ – an arrangement that would never have happened in their own armies. That Funston needed a minder only lessened their opinion of him. Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, only gave the best impression, a self-assured aristocrat with deadly charm and a first-rate temperament.

The first American force to land in France was the 1st Infantry Division composed of regular regiments. In the regular regiments, however, at least half the men were new recruits. Pershing worried about the impression they would make when the French invited a contingent to march in the Bastille Day parade. Despite their lack of smart uniforms and drill, the French crowds went wild.

The view from Berlin was dismissive. The Chief of the German General Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, did not think much of the Americans. His impression had been fixed by the opinion of the late genius of the wars of German unification, Field Marshal Helmut von Moltke (the Elder). He had sniffed at the American experience in their Civil War as nothing more than the collision of armed mobs. Falkenhayn had no doubt that the German Army would make short work of the new generation of these new armed mobs that were assembling so slowly in France. The minuscule size of the regular US Army and the unmilitary nature of the Americans simply reinforced his opinion that any expansion could only result in an incompetent force. His optimism was buoyed by the German success in defeating every Allied attack in the West and in the crushing blows that had sent the Russians reeling on the Eastern Front.

The German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, was of a different mind. He was burdened by his role in helping to create the conditions which forced the British to declare war on Germany. Now he fretted that just another such mistake had led to America’s entry into the war. He was not as dismissive of the Americans as Falkenhayn. He was much more aware of their economic power and huge population. The foreign ministry papers on American potential had been more than revealing – they had been alarming. He realised that Falkenhayn had missed the forest for the trees. Yes, the Americans were indeed not a military people – uniforms and parades did not impress them – but their history showed clearly that when provoked they were a very warlike people. In this they had much in common with the Australians, whose valour was being thrown away at Gallipoli. Bethman-Hollweg’s attempts to caution Falkenhayn were wasted.

The Chief of the Imperial General Staff was becoming obsessed with a way to break the stalemate on the Western Front. He concluded that although the British were the more dangerous enemy, their front offered no good purchase for decisive action. The French on the other hand, he believed, were near exhaustion. If he could entice them into desperately trying to hold onto something that their national pride would not let them relinquish, Falkenhayn was convinced he could bleed them white. He would turn that battle into a killing machine. Verdun was the perfect point for the attack. He had assured the Kaiser that the superiority of the German Army was such that, in either attack or defence, it would inflict three casualties for every one it suffered. His strategy was sure to bring the enemy to their knees. The Kaiser retorted, ‘Attrition is the absence of strategy! Go back to work and figure something else out.’¹⁷

By December only four American divisions had arrived – 1st and 2nd infantry divisions and the 26th and 42nd infantry divisions of the National Guard. Each American division numbered 28,000 men, with four large infantry regiments in two brigades, about the size of a European corps. In addition, the Marine Corps provided a brigade (5th and 6th marines), commanded by Colonel John Lejeune. Pershing had so impressed Funston that the latter had quickly promoted him to command the new I Corps (1st and 42nd infantry divisions). The II Corps included the remaining two divisions. The Marine Brigade remained an army-level reserve. By December Funston was ready to stand up the 1st Army, and he gladly handed the command to Pershing.

In January, German intelligence reported that the American 1st Army was about to take over part of the Verdun sector from the French. Two more divisions arrived and went into training in the rear. Falkenhayn had been stung by the imperial rebuke. He was shortly offered a solution. Where before he had seen the Americans as relatively unimportant, he now saw the Americans as an opportunity.

Funston was like an excited terrier as his divisions moved into the trenches, often going in with the first battalions to personally observe. Pershing had argued fruitlessly that he had enough to worry about without having the commander of the American Expeditionary Force roaming the forward trenches like a second lieutenant.

On 15 January Funston decided to accompany one of the leading platoons of the 18th Infantry Regiment (1st Infantry Division) as it took over the front-line trenches from the French. He had refused a large escort and ordered the regimental commander to get on with his duties. Little did he know that Falkenhayn had planned a welcoming present for the Americans. The German had instructed Crown Prince Wilhelm, whose army group included the 5th Army facing the Americans, to carefully note their arrival in the trenches. Just as Funston was peering over a parapet, with his aide pleading for him to get down, the Germans dropped a barrage over just that part of the trenches in the shape of an isolating box of exploding shells. From carefully cut holes in the wire, German Stosstruppen (assault troops specially trained for trench raiding) dashed forward, tossing grenades into the trenches and dropping down into them to spray left and right with their machine pistols. The aide had jumped in front of Funston to take the bullets. Shielded by the dying lieutenant, Funston pulled his own .45-calibre pistol and dropped the first German and then the one behind him. Within seconds the trench around him was a seething mass of men in grey and brown locked in hand-to-hand combat.

It was an uneven contest. The elite German raiders outnumbered the defenders and were better trained and equipped for the bloody work. But Funston had not been known as a killer for nothing. He had faced Spanish bayonets and Filipino bolos before. His pistol empty, he picked up an entrenching tool, one side sharpened for just such a moment. He caught the first German in the corner of the neck and nearly decapitated him. Another swipe sent a German screaming with his face slashed open. Funston drew back his arm to strike the next man when suddenly the entrenching tool slipped from his fingers, and he simply fell into the mud. The Germans trod over his body as they cleaned out the rest of the Americans in that isolated part of the trench and hustled their prisoners back across no man’s land.

Pershing’s prediction was borne out when he received an urgent telephone call from the Chief of Staff of the 1st Division, Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall. Funston had been killed in a German trench raid. He had not gone easily. His body was found near those of his aide and escort, surrounded by four dead Germans. Strangely there was no mark on his body. An autopsy would show that he had died of a massive heart attack.

Pershing immediately assumed temporary command of the AEF, a measure which was immediately confirmed by Franklin Roosevelt. Funston’s death stunned Washington, alarmed the Allies, and greatly amused the Germans. They thought it a good omen. Falkenhayn pinned a Pour le Mérit on the commander of the raid. He was more than pleased with himself. His thinking had been confirmed.

Verdun

Funston’s death had sent a shock wave through the Allies. For one thing, it had become rare in this war for a general officer to fall in battle. Far more significant was the moral effect of killing the commander of the new ally. The British and French generals with whom he had worked were actually relieved and somewhat enjoyed the American comeuppance. Funston had been a hard man to like. Their other ranks volunteered the names of some of their own generals they would like to see go the same way. The Americans, on the other hand, were out for revenge. The Germans, once they discovered whom they had killed on the raid, were both astounded and amused. It contributed to their growing contempt of the Americans as a serious enemy.

Secretary of War Newton D. Baker immediately travelled to Europe to sort out the new command and inspect the AEF, now grown to half a million men, most of whom were in advanced training in north-eastern France. In contrast the British had 1,210,000 men in France.¹⁸ The 1st Army was still only seven divisions strong with the arrival of the 3rd Infantry Division. Baker was relieved to receive a glowing report on Pershing from Franklin Roosevelt. Pershing brought to his attention in no uncertain terms the critical failure to supply his growing army with basic firearms. ‘Mr Secretary, you can build an army of ten million men, and it won’t mean a damn if you can’t put a rifle in the infantryman’s hands.’ The production of rifles and other small arms had been very slow. At the beginning of the war, Kitchener had ordered two million Enfield rifles from American producers, but at a Parliamentary inquiry in early June he would admit that only 480 had actually been delivered.¹⁹ The British in particular were experiencing their own shell shortage at the time and could spare nothing for the Americans in that regard. The French were in better shape, but what they could provide the new American divisions was limited.

Pershing continued, ‘At this rate, Mr Secretary, the supply of Springfield rifles we had at the beginning of the war will only allow us to equip ten divisions here in France, given the training requirements at home, even if we use all the Krag stocks. I am already receiving thousands of men who have had no musketry training whatsoever. I have had to ensure that only the infantry is issued the Springfield; all other troops requiring a rifle – engineers, signals, guards behind the lines – are being issued Krags.’ Baker could only promise him that every effort would be made to accelerate production of small arms.²⁰

Pershing had more than enough problems in ensuring that the 1st Army was ready and able to hold its new sector. And it was very bad one, thought Lieutenant Colonel Marshall. The sector formed a shallow salient that was bisected by the Meuse River, which at this time was rain swollen to a mile in width, effectively cutting the east and west banks off from mutual support except by artillery. Joffre had attached a colonial corps to 1st Army to occupy the west bank of the Meuse but retained command of the fortress complex in French hands. But at the same time, at Marshal Joffre’s insistence, the forts had been stripped of most of their garrisons and guns.

Not only were the defenses of Verdun in poor condition but the salient was poorly served by roads and railroads, a situation which was to make logistical support difficult. Two standard-gauge railroads entered the city, one from the south and the other from the west. The former had been cut by the enemy at St. Mihiel, and the latter was within German artillery range. There was a narrow gauge line from Bar-le-Duc, but it had a very limited capacity. Fortunately, the highway from Bar-le-Duc had recently been improved.²¹

Crown Prince Wilhelm was relieved at Falkenhayn’s change of mission. He had been as aghast as his father at the proposed killing machine Falkenhayn wanted to unleash on the French. The machine worked both ways, he reasoned, and he was solicitous of the lives of the men he commanded. Although he had had little command experience before the war, he had learned quickly from his skilled army group General Staff. As Winston Churchill would later comment, ‘It may also be said that no group of German armies was more consistently successful than his; and that there is evidence that this personal influence – whatever it may have been – was often thrown into the right side of the scales.’²² He had come to realise along with Falkenhayn that trench warfare had made fortresses that could not be bypassed or stormed. But the Americans, Falkenhayn concluded, would by their very inexperience be the exception. The 5th Army’s mission was then to smash in the Americans and break through to open country, to restore movement to the war, a skill in which the Germans excelled.

In a masterful concentration of forces in January and February, the German Army massed over 1,200 guns including 542 ‘heavies’, among which were thirteen of the 420-mm and seventeen of the 350-mm howitzers that had crushed the Belgian forts in the first month of the war. Then new rail lines were laid and ten stations built to handle the concentration. With the guns came mountains of shells carefully hidden in huge underground bunkers. Four new corps of ten highly rated divisions reinforced the 5th Army’s nine divisions. The Germans would strike a zone of eight miles of the American front with one division and 150 guns per mile. The initial barrage was to be so crushing that ‘no line is to remain unbombarded, no possibilities of supply unmolested, nowhere should the enemy feel himself safe.’ The blow was named Operation Gericht (Judgement). Falkenhayn had every expectation that it would, indeed, be Judgement Day for the Americans.²³

French intelligence correctly identified the build-up and its intended target. Joffre and the French General Staff dismissed it as a deception. Pershing, however, did not. In a series of savage trench raids, nicknamed ‘Funsties’, the Americans brought back enough prisoners, augmented by a deserter or two, for them to confirm the conclusions of French intelligence.

Pershing arrayed his forces with this in mind. The 1st Army had the French 3rd Army on the left and the 2nd Army on the right. His I Corps (1st and 41st infantry divisions) was on its left at Brabant sur Meuse. Next came II Corps (26th and 32nd infantry divisions), and to its right was the III Corps (2nd and 42nd infantry divisions) with its right at Gussainville on the Orne River. The 1st Army front ran twenty-two miles. In reserve was the Marine Brigade and the 3rd Infantry Division, which was pulled early out of advanced training. All in all the entire AEF had half a million men in France, but fewer than half were 1st Army. By this time, the entire prewar stock of Springfield rifles has been distributed, but production was only up to three thousand a month, barely enough to equip one infantry regiment.²⁴

In the Verdun sector, recently promoted Colonel Marshall recommended that, considering the weight of the oncoming attack, the front lines be thinned considerably with only enough troops to delay the Germans. The Americans then discovered how seriously the forts defending Verdun had been denuded of men, guns, and ammunition. The 66,000 men in the garrisons had been reduced to caretaker staffs with 237 guns and 647 long tons of ammunition removed. The smashing of the Belgian forts by German heavy artillery had convinced the French that their own forts were far too vulnerable. Only the heavy guns in the retractable gun turrets remained. In a stormy meeting with Joffre, Pershing demanded and finally received control of the Verdun forts. He immediately began transferring troops in training camps, primarily artillery and engineers, to man them. The French caretaker troops remained to train the Americans on the functioning of the forts.

Trench raids by both sides reached a crescendo in mid-February. Encounters between raiding parties in no man’s land were becoming common. The Stosstruppen were surprised at the sheer aggressiveness of the Americans. Their first raid had made the Germans overconfident. They would have been shocked to learn that the dashing Chief of Staff of the 42nd Infantry Division, Colonel Douglas MacArthur, personally led trench raids armed with only a riding crop. It was his raid that brought back the prisoner that told them of the date of the attack.²⁵

Judgement Days

Dawn had not yet brightened the horizon on 21 February when the first German gun symbolically sent a round into the fortress complex. ‘Three hours later the real bombardment began. For over twelve hours the … German guns fired 100,000 shells per hour into a small area, a bombardment of unprecedented ferocity.’²⁶ The Germans did not plan to throw masses of men at the enemy. They intended their artillery to smash the enemy; their infantry would pick up the pieces. Their plans for overcoming any surviving defences were subtle and well-thought out. At 1715 the cry went up along the German trenches, ‘Raus, Raus!’ as a wave of specialised groups emerged to advance over the 650 to 1200 yards of no-man’s land. One German would write:

Each troop had a specific task, with an objective of limited breadth and depth. Before taking hold of it, a wave of scouts was sent forward to test the destruction by the artillery fire. If the destruction were not thorough the scouts retired and further artillery preparation was organised. The attack took place in waves about 80 meters apart. First came a line of pioneers and men with bombs. Then came the main body in single file. Then followed a reserve section carrying up ammunition, tools, sandbags, and filling up the gaps in the first wave. A second line followed in the same order, passing through the first line, supporting it if checked and renewing the assault on their own initiative. The attack should now proceed by encircling movements, utilizing cover and passing along ravines. Thus the centres of resistance would fall one by one. Shell fire would support the advance continually. On no account should troops attempt to overcome resistance which has not been broken up by artillery fire. Units, when held up, must wait for fresh artillery action.²⁷

The lightly manned forward trenches were indeed smashed. A hundred thousand men were advancing on an eight-mile front to the east of the Meuse. Suddenly flares shot up from the centre of no man’s land. Now it was the turn of the American artillery to respond, joined by the concentrated French batteries to the west of the Meuse. The German scouts were in advance of the fire, but it caught the pioneers and grenade men and the main body out in the open and did terrible slaughter.

The scouts were surprised to find almost no one in the smashed forward trenches. Yet with the enemy artillery dicing through no man’s land, it was difficult to report the situation. The main body eventually forced its way through the artillery with some loss, only to find that the scouts had nothing to report. There was no enemy except a few dead bodies and the occasional stubborn machine-gun crew. The terrain was hilly with ravines running south-west, which tended to direct the Germans in that direction to run up against the rain-swollen Meuse instead of due south at Verdun. The German attacking waves were now bunching up as they overran the wrecked trenches, making an even greater meal for the American and French guns. By the time the scouts had been sent forward again, it was the morning of the 22nd.

The Germans repeated their tactics that day against the new American main line of resistance, but this time their fires were less effective. They were also hit by brigade-level counterattacks delivered with an élan and fury that they had not seen since 1914. Yet such courage was costly. The Americans paid a heavy price against their more experienced enemies. The battle see-sawed across the smashed forward trenches. In places the Americans pushed the Germans back to no man’s land, only to be driven back in turn by the inevitable German counterattacks. In the swirling, confused fighting, 2nd Brigade of 41st Division found itself cut off and surrounded. The Germans seized advantage of the sudden gap in the American line, pressing forward past flimsy defences. They drove the 1st Infantry Division back towards the Meuse near Samogneux.

The American I Corps was now assailed by elements of the German VII Reserve and XVIII Corps threatening to cut it off. Colonel John Lejeune, commanding the Marine Brigade, made an epic march to throw his two regiments at the German XVIII Corps flank, driving it in and re-establishing contact with 1st Division. The Germans had not seen such bayonet attacks since the opening days of the war. By all odds the assault should have failed in the face of concentrated rifle and machine-gun fire, but the Germans were not prepared for how swiftly and effectively the marines crossed the beaten zone to fall upon them. The price to save I Corps was an appalling 2,500 casualties. Yet, the Germans had gained a great respect for the marines, calling them Teufel Hünde (Devil Dogs), a battle honour that the marines would add to their ever-growing list. Pershing immediately appointed Lejeune to command the badly shaken 41st Division. Renewed German attacks the next day forced I Corps to pull back south-eastwards. On that day the isolated American brigade tried to break out but was held in tight by follow-on German units.

It was like this all along 1st Army’s front. The Americans would be driven back only to turn on their heels and deliver sharp, though often unskilled and costly, counterattacks. They were being pressed back from west, north, and east towards the fortress belt of Verdun. On the fourth day, the line of the Meuse from just east of Cumiéres to just west of Charny – a distance of almost three miles – had been reached by the Germans. They immediately began bridging the rain-swollen river. Once across they would be in open country. Pershing committed his last reserve, the 3rd Infantry Division. Its 15th and 38th infantry regiments hammered the German bridgehead until it collapsed, then defended the river line for a brutal night and next day as the Germans repeatedly tried to cross. By then Joffre had committed his XXX Corps to close up to the Meuse and put paid to any German chance to bounce the river. For their stand on the river, those two regiments earned their division the title ‘Rock of the Meuse’, bestowed by Joffre himself.

On the fifth day the Germans, too long enfiladed by French artillery on the west bank of the Meuse, attacked from the north to clear it of the French VII Corps. The Crown Prince was not sanguine about the situation. The Americans had not broken, and he said, ‘We have hammered them into a position we will never get them out of.’ German losses had been heavy. They had learned that the Americans were resilient, and their counterattacks, though costly, were to be feared. Their accurate and rapid rifle fire reminded the survivors of 1914 of the British regulars. There had been too few prisoners as well, and that isolated brigade remained obstinately defiant. French reinforcements were also converging on Verdun. The Americans, on the other hand, were in a bad mood at having given up so much ground. Their baptism of fire had been painfully brutal. However, the Germans were the best of teachers, and their students quick to learn. At home the country held its breath as the greatest battle in American history unfolded.

Falkenhayn was not holding his breath. He was busy stripping more troops from the armies facing the British to reinforce the battle to break the Americans as they settled into the trench system connecting all the forts around Verdun. The storm of German artillery now fell on the old forts. To everyone’s amazement, unlike the Belgian forts, they held. The most important and largest of the nineteen forts was Douaumont at the northern apex of the complex.

Built between 1885 and 1903, the fort covered thirty thousand square metres and was four hundred metres long. A steel-reinforced concrete roof twelve metres thick, resting on a cushion of sand, protected two underground levels. The fort was armed with a 155-mm and a 75-mm gun in individual rotating/retractable gun turrets. Four more 75-mm guns were placed in flanking casemates that swept the intervals with machine-gun turrets. Hotchkiss anti-personnel revolving guns at each corner prevented entry into the surrounding moat.

The fort was a magnet for the Germans. A raiding party of the 24th Brandenburg Regiment (6th Infantry Division) led by Pioneer-Sergeant Kunze, slipped through the American strongpoints outside the fort and approached the moat. The weather was so bad that they were mistaken by American machine-gunners as a returning patrol. Kunze wanted to press forward but could see no access. His men refused to go any further. They were easily driven away by one of the fort’s machine guns. Another group of Brandenburgers led by reserve officer Lieutenant Radtke approached the fort from another direction, but were massacred by the alert garrison as they tried to cross the moat.²⁸

The battle ground to a stalemate despite repeated German attacks. The Crown Prince had been right. The Americans had been hammered back into the defences of Verdun, a much shorter front, which could be far more easily defended. Now that his front had been shortened so much, Pershing was able to rotate his divisions between the front and rest areas in the rear to prevent them from being burned out. Falkenhayn, in contrast, simply reinforced his committed divisions. Morale fell as the men realised that the battle had become a death sentence. Heavy rains simply worsened conditions for the attackers. On the American side reinforcements and supplies could only be forwarded by the single road and light rail from Bar-le-Duc. In the sort of organisational and logistical efforts for which the Americans had a special talent, almost all the huge fleet of tough Ford trucks in the AEF were devoted to keeping the 1st Army alive and fighting. Looking south from Verdun at night, the road was one solid chain of head lights. The troops dubbed it Henry Ford Drive.²⁹

Falkenhayn continued to strip away these reinforcements from the army group facing the British and throw them into the grinding fight at Verdun. The German concentration was much more vulnerable to the massed American and French artillery. The French 3rd Army fought off the German attempt to clear them from the west bank of the Meuse and continued to sweep the German rear with enfilade fire, disrupting their attempts to supply and reinforce their forces.³⁰

By the middle of March, it was clear to both Joffre and Pershing that the German attack had passed its culminating point, that time in the process of a battle when losses far outweighed any possible gains. It was a defining moment, such as when the French General Staff saw the gap opening between the German 1st and 2nd armies in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 and an officer had exclaimed, ‘They have presented us their flank!’ Opportunity beckoned. Joffre and Pershing were of one mind. The opportunity had potential far beyond the immediate battle. Intense pressure was put on Field Marshal Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to cooperate. Haig insisted the British were not ready, but the pressure was only elevated to the ministerial level and higher. Franklin Roosevelt, who had become essentially the American proconsul in Europe, personally met with Kitchener, Asquith, and the king, speaking directly for the president. Haig was finally budged, but not as far as Joffre and Pershing wanted. He had been planning for a major attack in the Somme for the beginning of July. The only help he could offer would have limited goals. Good enough, said Joffre.

Operation Drumfire began on 10 March. General Philippe Pétain’s heavily reinforced tough 2nd Army attacked directly into the German left flank. On 12 March Pershing sent the 1st Army into the attack just as the Germans had shifted their local reserves to meet Pétain’s offensive. Newly promoted Major General MacArthur, now commanding the 42nd Division, and Brigadier General Lejeune, commanding the 41st Division, ruptured the first German line despite heavy losses. MacArthur fell at the head of the last attack to the intense grief of his men.³¹ Falkenhayn’s response was to pull more troops from the armies facing the British. As soon as this became evident to the Allies on 15 March, Haig launched a series of attacks with limited goals. The weakened German front unexpectedly cracked, and the British quickly reinforced this success.

It was clear to almost everyone in the German higher commands that the great crisis of the war on the Western Front had arrived – everyone but Falkenhayn. It was left to the Crown Prince in a direct appeal to his father to demand that the offensive be called off. The Kaiser rose to the logic of the occasion and dismissed his Chief of the General Staff. General Paul von Hindenburg, the commander of German forces on the Eastern Front, replaced him. It took all his unflappable steadiness and the genius of his alter ego, General Erich Ludendorff, to jury rig repairs to a collapsing Western Front as spring arrived. The 5th Army withdrew to its starting point and was even driven back across the Orne. It was then bludgeoned by Pershing and Pétain’s joint attack, which pushed dangerously close to Metz and the railways that supplied most of the German armies to the west.

To the north the situation was even more desperate. The Germans had been pushed out of their defences that had multiplied their combat power in the past. The Hindenburg–Ludendorff repairs unravelled. The unexpected break in the German front allowed the British cavalry corps, ably supported by armoured-car detachments, to fan out in the German rear. The German armies there fought stubbornly where they could, but the front was no longer a single fortress line. It had been ruptured. Almost a hundred thousand prisoners were taken as the BEF surged forward. It became increasingly futile to shift reserves to ward off a relentless cascade of blows. The final blow was the fall of Metz to the Americans and the French in Operation Lafayette on 30 May. The railway network supplying the German armies to the West was thereby severed. Church bells rang across both France and America. In desperation for a victory the Germans sallied their High Seas Fleet for a showdown battle with the British Grand Fleet. The resulting Battle of Jutland was a decisive defeat for the Germans on 1 June. On the Eastern Front, three days later the Russian Brusilov Offensive erupted and went on to break the back of the Austro-Hungarian Army, forcing Vienna to sue for peace. There could be no reinforcements from the disintegrating Eastern Front. Defeat upon defeat crushed the hope of an increasingly hungry German people.³²

In the bitterest day of his life, the Kaiser authorised Bethmann-Hollweg to seek an armistice at the beginning of July. The queen of the Netherlands offered her good offices, and commissioners met in The Hague to hammer out the truce that threw silence over the armies on the first day of August. Theodore Roosevelt’s outsized personality gave him a prominence in the fashioning of peace. Now his nature as a peacemaker eclipsed that of the soldier. It was his influence that prevented a ruinous peace from being imposed on Germany.

As the diplomats and generals said their goodbyes after the peace had been settled, a member of the French delegation, the white-maned Georges Clemenceau, responded to a German complaint that his country had been treated unjustly. The old man bristled with a fierce look. ‘Do not complain, Boche. You should kiss that American’s arse. Had you fought on, and had it been in my power, I would have fastened upon you such a Carthaginian Peace that you would never have risen again – Germania delenda est.’

The Reality

The point of departure for this chapter was the election of Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election, where, in fact, he had been defeated by running as leader of a third party against Republican President Howard Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson. He had actually picked Taft to succeed him in the 1908 election. Thereafter Taft and he had had a falling out that led Roosevelt to organise and run on the ticket of the new Bull Moose party. By splitting the Republicans, Roosevelt handed the election to Wilson. Roosevelt’s actions in this story are fully in accord with his attitudes and statements. He was eager to get the United States into the Great War on the side of the Allies. His distant cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, was appointed by President Wilson as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a position in which he excelled. It led to a lifetime love for the navy. During the Second World War, Chief of Staff of the US Marshal, General George C. Marshall, pleaded with President Franklin Roosevelt to stop referring to the navy as ‘us’ and the army as ‘them’.

General Frederick Funston was a friend of Roosevelt and the most prominent American commander. He was actually picked by Secretary of War Baker and President Wilson to lead the AEF. He died of a massive heart attack just before the appointment could be made. Pershing, who had been serving under Funston in the expedition against Mexico at the time, was then selected.

American intervention in mid-1915 would have come at a time when American production of weapons and the other materials of war had not had time to tool up as it had by the time the United States entered the war in mid-1917. There would have been a very large bottleneck in equipping the expanding US Army because the Allies themselves were in the process of expanding their production in that first year of the war. That alone would have limited the number of American divisions that could actually be equipped for combat. Nevertheless, by late 1916 the American economy would have been fully tooled and able to support a multi-million-man AEF, a full two years before America’s actual entry into the war in April 1917. The disparity in numbers and resources most likely would have peaked far earlier than it did in reality because a large part of the German Army was still committed to the Eastern Front.

In reality, in 1917 American weapons producers had already tooled up for producing the British Enfield rifle, despite the contracts being cancelled in June 1916. The decision was made to concentrate on producing an Enfield modified to take American ammunition. It was designated the M1917 Enfields or the ‘American Enfield’. During the war, 2,193,429 American Enfields were produced. It was issued to 75 per cent of the AEF and was the weapon with which Sergeant Alvin York earned the Medal of Honour. In the Second World War the British bought 618,000 of these weapons, which were delivered in the summer of 1940.

Falkenhayn concluded that the Western Front was a fortress that could not be turned. Instead he planned the Battle of Verdun to be a killing machine, convinced that he could force the French to bleed their army white and break the morale of the French people at an acceptable cost in German lives. That was one of the greatest miscalculations in military history. He had thought that he could inflict three French casualties for every one German. Instead, it turned out to be almost one to one. In this story, the presence of a new and inexperienced American army inserted into the line at Verdun invalidated those calculations and made a complete rupture of the front a real possibility to him.

Sergeant Kunze and Lieutenant Radtke were actually responsible for capturing Fort Douaumont by entering through undefended casemates left unmanned by Joffre’s insistence on stripping the forts of their garrisons. The officer who came much later to take over command of the fort sent the report of its capture. He was the one awarded the Pour le Mérit, Germany’s highest medal, by the Kaiser. It certainly seemed fitting, for the man was a Prussian officer whose family name was preceded by ‘von’, the mark of the historical German social and political elite. Neither Kunze nor Radtke were recognised during the war. Only when the official histories were written after the war were their deeds discovered. Kunze was a police officer then and received a quickly advanced promotion to inspector. Radtke was given an autographed photo of the deposed Crown Prince. Sic transit gloria mundi.³³